Comparison of full-text searching to metadata searching for genes in two biomedical literature cohorts

also is significantly lower than that of metadata searching. Certain features of articles correlated with higher relevance ratings. A significant feature measured was the number of matches of the search term in the full-text of the article, with a larger number of matches having a statistically significant higher usefulness (i.e., relevance) rating. By using the number of hits of the search term in the full-text to rank the importance of the article, performance of full-text searching was improved so that both recall and precision were as good as or better than that for metadata searching. This suggests that full-text searching alone may be sufficient, and that metadata searching as a surrogate is not necessary. Introduction Traditionally, most researchers have searched for scholarly information through bibliographic databases which match search keywords against the metadata that describes the content, with journal articles being the most common form of content (Hersh et al., 2006). Examples of commonly used bibliographic databases include PubMed and the ISI Web of Knowledge. The metadata description serves as a surrogate for the complete article itself. With the advent of electronic (i.e., digital) versions of articles being available, there has been an increased interest in searching the complete, or " full-text, " article itself. Many publishers are beginning to support full-text searching of their online content (e. found that the vast majority of people (89%) turn to search engines to initiate their searches for information while few use library Web pages (2%) or online databases (2%). Even academic research scientists prefer search engines over library Web pages for their information searching for research purposes (Hemminger, 2005, 2007) and are increasingly turning to meta-search interfaces such as Google Scholar to perform full-text searches. Several factors have led to the success of full-text tools such as Google Scholar: having a single simple search interface covering all resources (meta-search), the increasing amount of scholarly material available on Web pages or through resources made available to search engines, instant results and the ability to access the final content via a single click, and the utility of full-text searching versus metadata searching. This article is concerned with the latter issue—understanding in more detail how full-text searching compares with metadata-based searching of scholarly literature. While it is clear that full-text matches of search strings yield more matches than does just searching for matches within the metadata of articles, it is not evident how many more …